A Virginia filmmaker who made a short film about Pottstown’s pioneering early education program called PEAK has alerted the district of his desire to make a full-length documentary film about the first children to benefit from the program.

Superintendent Jeff Sparagana told the school board recently that filmmaker John Harrington, president of Virginia-based Madison films, has expressed an interest in building on the work he did in 2009 when he put some film shorts together for a presentation on Pottstown’s early education efforts for the Pennsylvania Office of Childhood Development and Early Learning.

Harrington hopes to track some of the students he first filmed through their education in Pottstown to explore how their early education experience may have helped “and have the students and parents tell their story about their partnership with PEAK,” Sparagana said.

PEAK stands for Pottstown Early Action for Kindergarten Readiness and, speaking from the West Coast Friday, Harrington said he was intrigued both by the “long-term vision” of the program, as well as the fact that “it’s beyond just academics, it enlists the community as a whole.”

“The concept behind the film is to check-in periodically over the next several years and develop a relationship with the kids and the parents and try to get a sense of how they’re doing over time and how much they have benefitted, or not benefitted, from this early education effort,” said Harrington. “It’s going to be an interesting experiment.”

“It’s a worthwhile study, and timely,” Harrington said, pointing to President Obama’s inclusion of the issue of early childhood education in this year’s State of the Union address.

“Study after study shows that the sooner a child begins learning, the better he or she does down the road. But today, fewer than 3 in 10 4-year-olds are enrolled in a high-quality preschool program. Most middle-class parents can’t afford a few hundred bucks a week for private preschool. And for poor kids who need help the most, this lack of access to preschool education can shadow them for the rest of their lives,” Obama said in his nationally televised address.

“I propose working with states to make high-quality preschool available to every child in America. Every dollar we invest in high-quality early education can save more than seven dollars later on — by boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, even reducing violent crime. In states that make it a priority to educate our youngest children, like Georgia or Oklahoma, studies show students grow up more likely to read and do math at grade level, graduate high school, hold a job, and form more stable families of their own. So let’s do what works, and make sure none of our children start the race of life already behind. Let’s give our kids that chance,” Obama said.

He is not the only political leader in Washington eyeing early education as a priority.

Pennsylvania’s senior senator, Robert Casey, for the second time has made a proposal to boost early childhood education across the country.

When he proposed a similar effort in 2007, he visited Montgomery Early Learning Center students in Pottstown to get a first-hand look at the PEAK program.

During this more recent push, called the “Prepare All Kids Act,” Casey said he hopes Obama’s mention of the importance of early education gives it more momentum in Congress.

“This is one of the best ways to ensure that we have the kind of skilled workforce that we’re going to need not only in Pennsylvania but in the country in the years ahead,” Casey said in a conference call with reporters. “You can’t really begin a conversation about economic growth or job creation or building the kind of skill levels we need to compete with countries around the world unless we make the investment we should make in early learning.”

Under Casey’s proposal, federal money would be provided to states with programs working to establish or expand pre-K programs, matching state funds.

Improving early education is actually a key economic initiative, said Casey, noting “this is how we out-compete the Chinese. This isn’t just a nice thing to do for children, it’s imperative.”

Although Pennsylvania does have an early education incentive, called Pre-K Counts, which — along with the United Way of Greater Philadelphia and the Pottstown Area health and Wellness Foundation — provides funding for PEAK, Casey said only 17 percent of 3- and 4-year-olds in Pennsylvania receive early childhood education. Pennsylvania’s pre-K program served just four percent of the Commonwealth’s pre-school-aged children, he said.

In 2010-2011, about 1.32 million children of all ages attended state-funded pre-K programs — for a total cost of $5.49 billion — and 28 percent of all 4-year-olds nationwide were enrolled, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research.

That report ranked Pennsylvania 10th in the nation for state spending on early education; 25th for access of early education program for 4-year-olds and said Pennsylvania early education programs met just over half the 10 quality benchmarks measured.

Nationally, total state funding for pre-K programs decreased by nearly $60 million nationwide. This is the second year in a row for which inflation-adjusted spending dropped, following a $30 million decrease in 2009-10, according to the study.

Reaching children in those early formative years is critical said Sparagana, whose expertise on the subject is such that he was named to the Governor’s Early Learning Council and was invited by the state last year to be a member of a six person team that represented Pennsylvania at a national symposium sponsored by the Mid-Atlantic Comprehensive Center focused on high-quality early learning programs.

(In fact, Sparagana earned his doctorate with a thesis on “The Effect of a Half-Day Pre-Kindergarten Program on School Readiness in Kindergarten.)

“By the time a child hits 5 years of age, their brains are 90 percent formed. If they’re not being exposed to literacy, to numbers before that, they are very likely to struggle,” Sparagana said.

Beyond just academics through, is the necessity of being “ready to learn,” he explained.

“It is critical for a student’s success in kindergarten that they arrive able to take direction, to be patient and to be able to share,” Sparagana said. “Otherwise, we spend those first critical year changing bad habits versus reinforcing good ones. The older they are, the harder it is, the more money it costs and the less the chance of success.”

Those kinds of hurdles, said PEAK Coordinator Mary Reick, are most common with children who come from economically disadvantaged homes, or with teen mothers.

It’s also important to recognize, she said, that child-rearing in the home is now what it used to be.

“Certainly, parents are their child’s first teacher, but now we’re seeing households where mom and dad may have different roles, they may both be working, or there may be absentee parents,” she said.

“There are certainly plenty of kids in Pottstown who need services and that was why we wanted to work with community partners,” she said. “When we were just running the pre-K, we could only reach the kids who were in that program and we knew we could reach other kids in Pottstown by partnering with other providers.”

One of those providers was Warwick Child Care, which has a branch in North Coventry.

Michelle Fritz, the director of that branch, said the organization’s partnership with PEAK has been a boon to students, teachers and parents alike.

“PEAK has been great for our center. It has brought a lot of resources and has meant a lot of growth for our kids; it has provided professional development for the staff and the parents love it because of the early learning that occurs and how well it prepares their children for school,” said Fritz, who noted that the center serves quite a few children from Pottstown as well as those across the river in North Coventry.

The partnership began when the district began approaching providers in 2006.

Sparagana said a slow-and-steady approach, which included a year of planning and meeting with partners, helped to overcome the reluctance on the part of different providers who viewed each other as competitors.

Now, by partnering through PEAK, care-givers at the various partner agencies have been certified and the education they are providing to the children there is not only certified by the school district, but consistent with what the children will be taught when they enter kindergarten, creating what educators call a “seamless continuum.”

How much its helping is difficult to assess, even though the program has been in place for more than five years because many of the children are still in their early years in school.

Reick said the very first children to go through the PEAK program are just now entering third grade, the first year state-wide standardized tests are taken by district students. So far, she said, PEAK students are scoring “higher than the district average.”

Sparagana said the district will “definitely” track students as they move through the grades to assess the effectiveness of the PEAK program and make improvements where possible.

Of course a good education is more than just test scores.

Some studies of other larger national programs, such as Head Start and the Perry Preschool Study, which are not affiliated with PEAK but operate under a similar philosophy of early intervention, have found that the test score gains made as the result of early education programs can fade in later grades.

A more recent study noted that “fade-out is particularly strong for African American children and very disadvantaged children. Still, it is these children who experience the largest long-term benefits.”

It found that other long-term measures, such as graduation rates, long-term employment and other measures of escaping the cycle of poverty, are increased when compared to those who did not participate in Head Start as children.

Harrington said it is some of the nuances behind test scores that he hopes to capture in his year of filming in Pottstown.

“It’s my hope that I can capture a more wholistic view of the success or failure of the program,” he said.

“This is really an onion with multiple layers and we want to see as many as possible,” Harrington said.

No matter how many layers the onion has, Sparagana said what’s important is that it is helping Pottstown stand out as being on the cutting edge when it comes to early childhood education.

In addition to Harrington’s first movie, Pottstown’s PEAK efforts were also used as one of only three case studies for the Center for the Study of Education Policy called “From Birth to Graduation and Beyond,” which looked at “aligning best practices in educational systems to improve learning outcomes,” which was funded by the Robert P. McCormick Foundation.

“I think people are definitely seeing that Pottstown is a pioneer in early education,” Sparagana said.

“I mean this is more than just education, this is life and the life of our community,” he said. “If we don’t give our students the foundation for success, how can we expect them to succeed?”

About the Author

Evan Brandt has worked for The Mercury since November 1997. His beat includes Pottstown, the surrounding townships and the Pottstown and Pottsgrove school districts, as well as other varied general topics like politics, the environment and education. Reach the author at ebrandt@pottsmerc.com
or follow Evan on Twitter: @PottstownNews.